Networked discontent: The anatomy of protest campaigns in social media

We analyze the communication network that emerged in social media around an international protest campaign launched in May 2012. Applying insights from network science and the theory of brokerage, we examine the cohesion of the network with community detection methods, and identify the users that spanned structural holes, creating bridges for potential information diffusion. We also analyze actual message exchange to assess how the network was used to facilitate the transmission of information. Our findings provide evidence of fragmentation in online communication dynamics, and of a distribution of brokerage opportunities that was both uneven and underexploited. We use these findings to assess recent theoretical claims about political protests in the digital age.     

Who cares about Reddit? Historical institutionalism and the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT Intellectual Property Act

In May 2011, the PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) was introduced to the United States Senate boasting 31 sponsors from both the Democratic and Republican Party. By January 2012 PIPA, along with counterpart in the House of Representatives known as the Stop Online Piracy Act was indefinitely shelved. Many have attributed this dramatic shift to the widespread backlash against the bills from online activists. The case thus suggests that the Internet has emerged as a powerful tool in allowing ordinary citizens to displace the entrenched power of special interests groups. However, given the role of activists and their rhetorical framing strategies in the defeat of the bills, the case also has theoretical implications for historical institutionalism. Namely, how can historical institutionalism, which favours institutions over agency, especially when explaining continuity, account for this? Can historical institutionalism account for agency, institutions, continuity and change in a unified way? This article responds in two ways. First, it argues that internet companies, not activists, were crucial in explaining the defeat of the bills. Second, it argues, it proposes a unified historical institutionalist approach to research, capable of explaining agency within institutions in institutional continuity and change.     

Liking and hyperlinking: Community detection in online child sexual exploitation networks

The online sexual exploitation of children is facilitated by websites that form virtual communities, via hyperlinks, to distribute images, videos, and other material. However, how these communities form, are structured, and evolve over time is unknown. Collected using a custom-designed webcrawler, we begin from known child sexual exploitation (CE) seed websites and follow hyperlinks to connected, related, websites. Using a repeated measure design we analyze 10 networks of 300 + websites each – over 4.8 million unique webpages in total, over a period of 60 weeks. Community detection techniques reveal that CE-related networks were dominated by two large communities hosting varied material –not necessarily matching the seed website. Community stability, over 60 weeks, varied across networks. Reciprocity in hyperlinking between community members was substantially higher than within the full network, however, websites were not more likely to connect to homogeneous-content websites.     

Young people as global citizens: negotiation of youth civic participation in adult-managed online spaces

With the proliferation of new media technologies, online spaces for civic engagement are being used as new sites by the young people for enacting global citizenship. Some of these online civic spaces are managed by parent organizations and guide the participants towards accomplishing goals that align with the institutional policies. We use Stuart Hall’s theoretical framework to ground the two methods we used for empirical research- textual analysis of the selected online spaces and in-depth interviews with young bloggers. Our analysis shows how negotiated reading of the encoded messages on the online platforms for youth civic engagement marks a political moment of signification in which there lies a possibility of challenging the dominance of the adult centered notions of civic engagement. Shelat’s online civic culture framework [2014. “Citizens, Global Civic Engagement on Online Platforms: Women as Transcultural Citizens.” Dissertation] helped us examine how these managed platforms encode global citizenship with pre-designed participatory practices that reinforce the hegemonic definition of youth political participation. Interviews of young bloggers on two online global spaces foreground the process of negotiation with the dominant definitions and the use of decoding strategies to create scope for subjective, more local definitions, as well as practices of civic engagement and global citizenship. Though literature suggests that adult-management of online youth spaces perpetuate a gap between the adult-centric notions of participation and the youth oriented ideas of civic engagement, our study reveals that the young participants find ways of articulating their ideas and enter these spaces with plans on how to fulfill their civic goals.     

Online Intermediary as a Channel for Selling Quality‐Differentiated Services

When deciding whether to utilize an online intermediary in addition to their own distribution channels, quality differentiated service providers face the trade‐off between the benefit of extended reach and the threat of increased competition. Using an analytical framework, we analyze when and how service providers may utilize an online intermediary to their advantage in the presence of advance selling (i.e., selling a service at an early date for future consumption). In general, when an online intermediary is used, the competition effect dominates the reach effect and leads to a falling price trend. Interestingly, we find that the negative effect of increased competition on profits, due to intermediary usage, can be reversed by committing to self‐imposed participation limits (i.e., selling only a predetermined amount of services through the online intermediary). This ensures that the service provider is better off selling through both its own site and the online intermediary, rather than selling exclusively using either channel.      

Feedback Mechanisms,Judgment Bias,and Trust Formation in Online Auctions*

Online markets, like eBay, Amazon, and others rely on electronic reputation or feedback systems to curtail adverse selection and moral hazard risks and promote trust among participants in the marketplace. These systems are based on the idea that providing information about a trader's past behavior (performance on previous market transactions) allows market participants to form judgments regarding the trustworthiness of potential interlocutors in the marketplace. It is often assumed, however, that traders correctly process the data presented by these systems when updating their initial beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that this assumption does not hold. Using a controlled laboratory experiment simulating an online auction site with 127 participants acting as buyers, we find that participants interpret seller feedback information in a biased (non‐Bayesian) fashion, overemphasizing the compositional strength (i.e., the proportion of positive ratings) of the reputational information and underemphasizing the weight (predictive validity) of the evidence as represented by the total number of transactions rated. Significantly, we also find that the degree to which buyers misweigh seller feedback information is moderated by the presentation format of the feedback system as well as attitudinal and psychological attributes of the buyer. Specifically, we find that buyers process feedback data presented in an Amazon‐like format—a format that more prominently emphasizes the strength dimension of feedback information—in a more biased (less‐Bayesian) manner than identical ratings data presented using an eBay‐like format. We further find that participants with greater institution‐based trust (i.e., structural assurance) and prior online shopping experience interpreted feedback data in a more biased (less‐Bayesian) manner. The implications of these findings for both research and practice are discussed.     

Promoting online media relations: Public relations departments’ use of Internet in the UAE

This paper discusses the use of Internet by public relations departments in the United Arab Emirates, to reach their key publics online and to gather information and monitor data to perform their tasks and to promote and develop their relations with the news media. Findings of the study show that all 24 organizations have a homepage, but only two thirds of them are posting their publications on the net, and only one third are using electronic newspapers to monitor their coverage in the media and to gather news, data and information of importance for the various tasks they perform. Only three organizations out of 24 have an online newsroom, and only two have a virtual tour about the organization. None of the surveyed organizations’ Web site has a film or videos. Organizations in the United Arab Emirates still have a lot to do to take advantage fully and rationally of what interactive communication, Internet and online publications are offering for a better performance and more effective public relations.     

Effects of online news forum on corporate reputation

This study tests the effects of online discussions about a company in an online news forum on people's perception of the corporate reputation of the company. The study is a 2 (tone of comments: negative versus positive) by 2 (number of comments: one versus five) factorial design experiment (n = 80). We found significant interaction effects between the two factors (tone versus number of comments) with regard to people's perception of the company's social responsiveness and employee treatment.     

The Concerns of Authors: Textual Analysis of Online Journal Reviews

This paper presents the results of an investigation of Chinese authors' attitudes towards, and concerns about, academic journals by analyzing their comments posted on a journal review Web site. The views of 338 authors about 13 Chinese academic journals in the library and information science field were collected. Using word frequency, word co-occurrence, and factor analysis, their comments were processed and the important factors extracted. The authors addressed a series of aspects regarding the journal itself, the review and publication process, and the service provided by editors. The paper provides a unique opportunity to understand Chinese authors' views using a direct source.